Ms. Collins has a suggestion about the “Weekend Sports Lineup” — she says if the House health care vote happens this weekend, perhaps you will want to flip back and forth between the football games. Mr. Blow, in “Obama’s to Fix,” says the financial crisis may have begun on George W. Bush’s watch, but the lack of jobs is now President Obama’s problem, and he needs to act quickly to solve it. In “Stress Beyond Belief” Mr. Herbert says that sending service members on numerous combat tours exacts a horrendous price on their mental health and the readiness of our armed forces. Here’s Ms. Collins:
Here we are at the big Health Care Bill Weekend! The House of Representatives is actually getting ready to vote on legislation. How long has this been in the works, anyway? Was “Mad Men” on TV when the debate started? Had TV been invented?
On the eve of the big vote, leaders admitted that things could stretch into next week. But no later than Tuesday. Unless something else happens. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Anyhow, we concerned citizens need to decide exactly what we’re rooting for. Public option? Which one? How much would you care if there were none at all? For some people, a health care bill without a public option is like a car without an engine. For others — including some members of the Obama administration — it’s more like a car without a hood ornament.
Everything was thrown into an uproar by this week’s elections, when people in Virginia and New Jersey voted down a deeply unpopular Democratic governor and a deeply incompetent Democratic would-be governor. This has been interpreted as a sign that the much-beloved independent voter thinks Obama is not doing enough, and also too much.
Congress is panicking! This happens quite a bit, but right now they’re behaving like a herd of overly caffeinated cattle that missed the last train connection.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing but confidence and serenity among the right-wing tea-party types. They cannot get over the triumph in upstate New York, where thanks to their really extraordinary efforts, a completely safe Republican seat went to the Democrats. Think how far their movement has come! Only a few months ago, they barely had the power to disrupt a town meeting. And soon they will be able to destroy anything in their path, including their own party, like conservative locusts.
The tea-party folk were back in Washington at the end of the week for a rally against the health care bill called by Representative Michele Bachmann, Washington’s newest Famous Strange Person. Their extreme enthusiasm and cheer was truly awesome.
Representative Todd Akin of Missouri led the rally in the Pledge of Allegiance — noting that the part about “one nation under God” always “drives the liberals crazy.” Then he promptly forgot the rest of the words. In most hyperpatriotic groups, the inability of a Congressman to remember that this is one nation indivisible might be a downer. But the crowd responded like a troop of pumped-up motivational speakers.
“Great job!” someone cried without the least trace of cynicism.
“That was awesome, Todd!” yelled someone else.
You cannot totally dislike a group with that kind of team spirit, so I hope those were not the exact same people carrying the sign that equated the health care bill with the Holocaust.
There was something sort of touching, in an eerie, slightly disturbing way, when John Ratzenberger — the guy who once played the mailman on “Cheers” — told the crowd that the health care bill advocates were “Woodstock Democrats” like Abbie Hoffman and Wavy Gravy. The crowd seemed on the old side, but is it really possible that any of them are still worrying about Abbie Hoffman? That any of them knew who Wavy Gravy is? Wasn’t his main claim to fame giving out free granola? Is this a problem we need to deal with at the present moment?
But I digress, sort of. If the health care vote happens this weekend, perhaps you will want to flip back and forth between the football games. Try to picture Minority Leader John Boehner as an overage cheerleader with a strange-colored tan.
A while back, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was promising that the House bill would have a “robust” public option that would have offered real competition to the insurance companies, thus driving costs down. But then Pelosi was faced with a mini-rebellion from red state Democrats who were terrified by the news of Republican victories in races having nothing whatsoever to do with Barack Obama, Congress or health care, and she modified the plan.
Now it’s a nonrobust option, sort of like decaf instant coffee. And even if it passes, the bill will go to the Senate where everybody is embroiled in an argument over whether the public option should involve a trigger, as Olympia Snowe urges, or an opt-out, which Majority Leader Harry Reid is peddling, or be eliminated altogether so the red state Democrats are pacified and Joe Lieberman does not go through with his threat to filibuster.
Although Lieberman is no longer a Democrat and backed John McCain in the last election, his former party did let him hang around and keep his important committee chairmanship. Supporting an attempt to kill the Democrats’ most important piece of legislation through a parliamentary procedure would be a tad churlish. But there we are.
The health care bill has a lot to recommend it anyway, but if you’re a public option fan, where do you draw the line?
Personally, in these moments of crisis, I generally recommend looking to see where Joe Lieberman is going. Then head the other way.
Here’s Mr. Blow:
What a difference a year makes.
In October 2008, the candidate Barack Obama delivered a major economic speech in Toledo, Ohio. In it he said: “Right now, we face an immediate economic emergency, and that requires urgent action. We can’t wait to help workers and families and communities who are struggling right now — who don’t know if their job or their retirement will be there tomorrow; who don’t know if next week’s paycheck will cover this month’s bills. … We need to pass an economic rescue plan for the middle-class, and we need to do it not five years from now, not next year, we need to do it right now.
“So today I’m proposing a number of steps that we should take immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities and help struggling homeowners. It’s a plan that begins with one word that’s on everybody’s mind, and it’s easy to spell: J-O-B-S.”
“Right now,” “immediate economic emergency,” “requires urgent action,” “can’t wait.” Wow! He gave the impression that job creation would be his top priority, that action would be swift and effective, that his solutions would not only stanch the hemorrhaging, but reverse the trend.
Fast forward. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released unemployment figures for October 2009. The official rate was 10.2 percent, up more than 50 percent from the time Obama gave that speech. Oops, nevermind.
(By the way, the underemployment rate, which includes part-time workers who want to work full time and those who’ve given up searching, is a staggering 17.5 percent.)
Job creation has dropped from top priority to one of many, and President Obama has been remanded to pandering for patience and offering excuses. On the one hand, he argues the tortured rationale that there is good news in the awful numbers: Things are still getting worse but at a slower pace. On the other, he incessantly reminds us that he inherited the crisis. The implication: Don’t blame me, blame Bush.
But this president can’t keep deflecting to the last one. Pain is presently felt. The crisis that took form on Bush’s watch is being experienced on Obama’s. Fair or not, finger-pointing is not effective policy.
This is now Obama’s crisis, and it carries political consequences. During Tuesday’s gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, nearly 9 in 10 voters said that they were worried about the direction of the nation’s economy in the next year. And the majority of those who held that view voted for the Republican candidates. This could portend a flashback to 1994.
It isn’t President Obama’s fault that he inherited this mess, but it is his to fix, and he must make haste. To paraphrase his Toledo prelection: you need to do it not five years from now, not next year, you need to do it right now. J-O-B-S.
And now here’s Mr. Herbert:
The authorities will deal with Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who is accused of bringing the nightmare of mass murder into the sanctuary of a military base on American soil. But the rest of us need to look very closely at the stress beyond belief that is being endured by so many other men and women in the armed forces — men and women who are serving gallantly and with dignity, who have not taken out their frustrations on one another, and who deserve better from the broader society.
Simply stated, we cannot continue sending service members into combat for three tours, four tours, five tours and more without paying a horrendous price in terms of the psychological well-being of the troops and their families, and the overall readiness of the armed forces to protect the nation.
The breakdowns are already occurring and will only get worse as the months and years pass and we remain engaged in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of this is the military’s fault. There have not been nearly enough people willing to serve in the all-volunteer armed forces to properly staff two wars that have already gone on for the better part of a decade.
I spent some time on the West Coast recently interviewing doctors and researchers studying the enormous problem of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with some form of mental health disorder, most commonly depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. The caseloads are off the charts, and very often the P.T.S.D. or depression (or both) are accompanied by substance abuse, problems with anger management, domestic violence and family breakdown.
These are not weak men and women we are talking about. This is the toll that the horror of combat, especially repeated doses of it, takes on people — even those who are young, physically fit and mentally sound.
“These invisible wounds of war are profound and relatively common,” said Dr. Charles Marmar, a psychiatrist and one of the nation’s leading experts on stress-related disorders. “Pound for pound, they may be more disabling than physical wounds. People often don’t seek treatment for P.T.S.D. or depression or psychosis, and they are very disabling without proper treatment.”
At the time I interviewed Dr. Marmar a few weeks ago, he was the chief of psychiatry at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco and vice chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He is to become chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at New York University on Dec. 1.
Both Dr. Marmar and a colleague at the medical center, Dr. Karen Seal, noted the link between multiple deployments and an increased risk of mental health problems. “We know there is a statistically significant association between having more than one deployment and P.T.S.D.,” said Dr. Seal.
Dr. Marmar added, “The Department of Defense is losing people right now — war fighters are being disabled by P.T.S.D. every day.”
The military has been trying to cope, but the challenge is enormous and there are significant institutional obstacles to overcome. Just last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke publicly about the widespread fear among military personnel that they will be stigmatized if they seek help for psychological problems. And he criticized the military and government bureaucracy for often complicating the efforts of individuals who are trying to get help.
The fallout from the mental health challenges facing America’s fighting men and women is vast, and it descends most immediately on close relatives. We have laid an unconscionably heavy burden on the volunteers and their families. The wives, husbands, children and parents bleed emotionally right along with those who are sent into the war zones.
This small sliver of the overall U.S. population has carried the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly without complaint, for years. It’s time to reassess what we’re doing to them.
By the end of last summer, the Army was reporting the highest tallies of soldier suicides since accurate record-keeping began. We’re getting saturation media coverage of Thursday’s outburst of horror at Fort Hood, but we haven’t heard a lot about the scores of suicides at that same base — the highest of any U.S. military installation — since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
If we’re going to fight wars as a nation, then we need to draw our warriors from a wider swath of the population and give them the full and complete support that they need and deserve. We’ll no doubt be analyzing the twisted psychological state of Nidal Malik Hasan every which way from sundown. But we’ll continue to give short shrift to the daily struggles and frequent horrors of the honorable men and women who have taken on the thankless task of fighting our wars.
This is not just shameful, it’s unsustainable.
